For decades, the artist Fernando Botero has been best known for the distinct and playful look of his paintings and drawings -- filled with colorful, rotund, almost balloon-like characters, in compositions that suggest that all's right with the world. While establishing Botero as one of the world's most recognized living artists, the naïve, folksy quality of his work led many critics to dismiss it, keeping him outside the inner circle of the established art world.
"Abu Ghraib," a traveling show of 50 paintings and drawings currently at Manhattan's Marlborough Gallery (open through November 17), has made many of those same critics reevaluate Botero. It has also forced visitors to face head-on the horrors that were committed against defenseless prisoners of Abu Ghraib by United States soldiers.
The show is harrowing, visually and emotionally. In one canvas, a pair of naked prisoners, blindfolded and bound by heavy ropes, are prodded into a painful coupling and soiled by a stream of urine from an unseen prison guard. Not far away, a blue-gloved hand yanks the hair of a terrified prisoner (again blindfolded), pushing him under a naked cellmate.
Throughout, Botero uses his considerable command of classical art tropes, utilizing the powers of persuasion and myth once practiced by Baroque and Renaissance painters. Snarling dogs, some just inches from the faces of blindfolded victims, are shades of the nightmare figures that illustrate Dante's Inferno; a drawing of a man, shackled in the form of a cross, brings to mind the Renaissance silverpoints of Michelangelo; a triptych echoes the pathos of a bloodied and suffering Christ with nothing to cover his nakedness and wounds; the martyred saints whose wounds pockmarked the paintings in Columbia's Colonial Baroque cathedrals are revived in the scenes of torture inflicted on Abu Ghraib inmates.
Notably, there is no reprise of the famous photo of a hooded prisoner, standing on a box, wired by the animus of his torturers. The artist says he used photos only for knowledge of basic facts: how big the prison was, how many prisoners were packed in a cell, whether there were windows where light from the outside world spilled into the hell of Abu Ghraib. Nor are there overt signs of America: no flags, no uniforms. Even the guards are, for the most part, offstage, represented only by a boot kicking an inmate, a stream of urine drenching another, a club beating an unprotected head, a hand urging on attack dogs. The soldiers are part of the system -- unseen jailors following unseen commands.
None of this should be taken as crudely political, stresses Botero, a slight man of 75 years who sports a goatee and leans forward to listen with the intensity of the hard of hearing. "I don't do political art," says the artist, who cut his teeth on the works of Diego Rivera and others. "The Marxists tried to change society. This is different. I don't paint to change anything."
Instead, he says, the paintings and drawings in the Abu Ghraib show are "a testimony that it was shocking that the United States would commit such barbarity." Testimony, he believes, is important. "The force of art is the length of time it speaks to people: This is a permanent accusation."
Botero has made such painterly accusations before: Those who were in New York in the late 1960s and early '70s, when Botero was studying and working in the city, might remember his jibes at Latin American strongmen, in paintings such as Official Portrait of the Military Junta, or a later work, War, that Botero painted in response to the Mid-East Yom Kippur War.
In the late 1990s, he became obsessed with the violence of the drug cartel wars that plagued his native Colombia. Over four years, recounts David Ebony in the handsome catalogue accompanying the exhibit, the artist documented "the victims of death squads, massacres, car bombs, and kidnappings." This, says Botero, is the privilege of the figurative artist. "Conceptual artists and others can create metaphors, but only the figurative artist can show what has not been shown. I can make visible what is invisible."
He decided to make the invisible world of Abu Ghraib visible in 2004. In April of that year, he read with horror Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article about the prison, and closely followed the news after that. "I was an addict. I couldn't stop reading," Finally, four or five months later, on a plane heading home to Paris, somewhere across the Atlantic, he stopped reading and started to sketch, on a napkin. "For 14 months, I worked on this. I was totally obsessed." The Columbian painted nothing else, and thought of little else: "My family, they put up with me." The output: over 100 paintings and drawings. "These images haven't been seen in magazines or on television; I donate them from my imagination."
Through Botero's imagination, we come eye-to-eye with the terror of innocent men -- reminded of the report by the International Committee of the Red Cross containing estimates from some military intelligence officers that "between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake."
Viewing the painting of a man, bloodied and blindfolded and bound to bars, unable to ward off the shame of being forced to wear a blood-red bra and thong, we recall the words of Sgt. Samuel Provance, part of the 302 Military Intelligence Battalion, who spoke out against "the collective silence" and recounted tales of detainees "stripped naked, and in some occasions, wearing women's underwear."
Botero, with his scenes of prisoners, piled on top of each other in pyramids of blue, green, and yellow degradation, confronts us with the reality of Hussein Mohssein Mata al-Zayiadi, who, when asked by an investigator about being forced to masturbate and join a pile of naked men, replied: "I was trying to kill myself, but I didn't have any way of doing it.''
Botero, who lived and studied in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is clearly saddened by Abu Ghraib's impact on the image of the United States. "Always, throughout Latin American, there had been great admiration for the U.S. success, its economics, its music, its movies, its freedom." After September 11, he recalls, "there was total love for Americans, and sympathy for what had happened. And then, the 100 percent love was worn away, because of the 'with us or against us' attitude coming out of Washington," he says. "And then Abu Ghraib … Never was there such a catastrophe for the U.S."
He adds: "I was surprised that more artists in America didn't do something about this."A few Americans artists have tacked the topic: Susan Crile recently had a show of her drawings inspired by the Abu Ghraib photos, and in 2004 Richard Serra used the shadowy figure of the hooded and wired prisoner in a powerful graffiti-like image that was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennale. But no one has detailed the episode with Botero's depth and power.
Why? Perhaps for the perceived lack of a public. While the exhibit has appeared in museums in Italy and Germany and is scheduled in more venues in Spain and elsewhere throughout Europe in the coming months, no more shows of Botero's "Abu Ghraib" works are currently scheduled in the United States. Botero very much wants the work to be shown here. But none of the Abu Ghraib paintings and drawings are included in a retrospective, pulled together by an Alexandria, Virginia, non-profit called Art Services International (ASI), that will be traveling in North America for three years, starting in January.
Botero says he was told by Lynn Rogerson, director of ASI, that no museums were willing to show the "Abu Ghraib" work. However, at least two of the nine museums scheduled to show the retrospective have said they would have been interested in having some of the works in the show. Carolyn Hill, executive director of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, said she was not made aware of the Abu Ghraib paintings and drawings in the retrospective prospectus, and added that ASI never contacted her about the Abu Ghraib collection. E. John Bullard, director of the New Orleans Museum of Art, told Art Forum that he would still be interested in including some of the work. (Rogerson was not available for comment.)
Given the power and quality of the works, it would be a shame for Americans to be denied further opportunities to see them. While the Marlborough gallery has received some irate calls and offended comments during "Abu Ghraib"'s run, such complaints have been sparse, while the critical reception has been laudatory. Botero for one would very much like to have as many people as possible exposed to the work -- none of the Abu Ghraib paintings are for sale. "I would not want to make money from misery," he explained. He says he plans to donate the paintings to a museum -- preferably one here in the United States.
Suzanne Charlé, who writes on culture and politics for The New York Times, The Nation, and other publications, is co-editor of Indonesia in the Soeharto Years: Issues, Incidents and Illustrations.
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